Or: Around The City In 80 Days

So I came back to the USA partly to experience living in the “lap of luxury” again and not have to worry about things falling apart so much. Rest and recuperate was the mantra I had planned. How’s that saying go again… If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans? Yeah, that sums it up pretty well. Here’s my story: Since leaving Portugal and heading back to the USA 80 days ago I’ve moved to a new domicile 6 times. Yep, I have been forced to move every 2 weeks or less. This despite having rented a studio apartment for 2 months straight. Oh, and I have been frightfully ill for over 2 weeks. In another 14 days, I’m leaving the country again. Hopefully I will be able to stay in one place longer than 2 weeks once I get there.

Trialfacts Recruitment Specialist

I was supposed to go from Portugal to Wisconsin to Tucson, but that plan got gorked when I got my new job. No, not the NP instructor position, the -other- new job. I needed a stronger internet connection than available on the island, so I headed back to the USA early for the final stages of the interviewing process and my onboarding. I spent the first 2 weeks in a Tucson AirBnB, then 2 weeks in Wisconsin-Los Angeles visiting family, then headed back to Tucson during the new-hire process. What exactly is this new-new job, you might ask? Did you know that up to 50% of medical trials fail to recruit more than a single participant into their study? They end up cancelling many studies, despite sinking tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of time into it, because they simply can’t recruit enough participants. Those studies that do go ahead are hamstrung by lack of power and validity due to not getting enough participants. Even among those that do recruit, 80% fail to meet enrolment timelines, resulting in delays in new treatments and medicines. Well, my new-new job is to solve recruitment for researchers and research centers. I work for a company that takes that headache away from researchers who never learned about it in grad school (God knows I didn’t in my research courses…), and sends a steady stream of participants their way so they can focus on the study itself. I get to talk to researchers about their studies and hear them declare with shining enthusiastic eyes about their projects and how they are going to change the world. I am the researchers’ contact person, and I tease out exactly what kind of participants they need, and how we might be able to recruit for them much more effectively than they could do themselves. I love the job, the work, and I work with fantastic people to boot. Additionally, I can perform this job from anywhere, as long as I can be available a few hours a day during Australian business hours. This position feels like it was “made for me,” and I’m doing my best to make the most of it!

Paint The Town... Noisy?

After returning to Tucson from Wisconsin-Los Angeles, I swear to God I must have eaten cream of wheat in a malt o’ meal town, because the shit hit the fan over and over and over. I moved into the apartment I had rented for 2 months. I came back to Tucson to work back at my old clinic while the current provider is out of the office on her “baby break.” Everything went fine for the first couple of weeks in my tiny efficiency apartment, but then the owner decided to have the other half of the guest house/duplex renovated. Suddenly I am being woken up every morning to hammering and sawing and smashing of things RIGHT NEXT TO MY HEAD. Now remember, I am working online from home 40 hours per week at this point at the research job and the teaching job, and also seeing patients at the clinic 3 days per week. Not pretty.

Run Away, Run Away, Run Away!!

I couldn’t stand it after two days, so I ended up running away to my friend Kate’s house to housesit and cat-sit while she and her daughter gallivanted off to Florida for some good wholesome family fun. The good news was I got away from the noise. The bad news was that the heater broke the first day I was there, and I was f-r-e-e-z-i-n-g so much I could barely function. Yes it actually gets cold in Tucson. And yes, you can stop laughing now, oh ye of Northern Places. It got down into the 20s during that time, and I had to go buy a radiator heater for my room so that my fingers wouldn’t get so cold I couldn’t type anymore.

“84 and Flying High”

Speaking of “cool,” I received a zinger of a Christmas card from my Great Aunt Jane. She sent a lovely religious faith-based card with angels and soft snowfall, with the rather cryptic tagline at the bottom “84 and Flying High.” However, she also included the above explanatory photo, of her tandem skydiving with a rather bemused looking tattooed 20-something instructor. I have been walking around with this picture of her in my purse and whipping it out to people and saying “look at my Great Aunt Jane! I’m blood related! I hope I’m flying high when I’m 84, too. YOU GO GIRL!!!” But you want to know something funny? I have not called her lately to tell her how much I love her, or amazing I think she is. Not since receiving this picture, anyway. I shall have to fix that forthwith.

Let It Go, Tucson, Let It Snow!

Continuing on the “cool/cold” trope, Tucson put on a gorgeous snowy display during the last hours of 2014. It began to snow just as many of us were getting together with our loved ones to celebrate the coming of the New Year. We Tucsonans had many a snowball fight and powdery wet cold shenanigans. However, I must fully hand it to my music theater friends, who absolutely nailed it. They already had professional lights, costumes and cameras ready/rolling/directed because they were filming a brief version of “Les Miserables” that evening as their new year’s party. In fact, I was a tramp in “Master of the House” and “Lovely Ladies.” No, you can’t have any pictures. Okay, well, maybe one or two. I left for a different party a few hours before midnight, and therefore missed the incredible show put on by these preposterously creative humans… while the snow was falling, they started prancing around in front of professional cameras under professional lighting wearing their 1800s garb and surreally belting “Let It Go” from Frozen. I did enjoy a fantastic snowfight and games with my other friends, but I must admit I’m a wee bit jealous that I missed out on the video made by these fine individuals shown above.

Back To Life, Back To Reality

Unfortunately, when my time at Kate’s house came to an end, the construction was still going full blast at my pre-rented apartment across town, so the landlord offered to put me up in a bigger, nicer place of his while they continued the work on my studio apartment. He also apologized profusely, gave me an amazon gift card and refunded my rent for the time I had to leave completely, before he could put me up in the bigger place. Well played, landlord, well played. I started developing a bad cold at this point, and pretty much didn’t leave the house for four days, and really appreciated the extra space to amble about in the few times I was actually vertical. Unfortunately, the landlord neglected to block out the bigger apartment I was staying in, so I had to move again another couple weeks later, back into the studio. He swore blue that the work would be completed when I was to make the move. I assumed he was telling the truth and was correct (foreshadowing: ASS-U-ME), so I wandered off to spend the weekend with a friend in Prescott.

Sunshine, Illness And Grief In Northern Arizona

I drove up to Northern Arizona to help a friend celebrate their birthday, and had a wonderful time in Prescott, even while fighting the above cold and exhaustion, which rapidly deteriorated into sinusitis, laryngitis, and bronchitis. Apparently this trip was not on my list of “most brilliant ideas ever,” according to its effect on my health status. Over the week, I put myself on asthma inhalers, then steroids, and then antibiotics, hoping I could kick it, but kept getting worse. Unfortunately, while I was driving up to Prescott, my friend had a close friend die (hit by a truck on their bike), so it was a somber time. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful time, and I got to enjoy some special time with special people and experience Prescott for the first time.

I managed to get out of the house and get a couple of slow walks in during my time in Prescott. I walked over the river and under the bridge, gazed at the sunset, and played on the swings. I said hi to some ducks, felt the wind blow, and used my inhaler almost every hour on the hour so that I could keep breathing through it all.

Nellie Bly: The Biggest Kaleidoscope Shop In The World

Not too far from Prescott resides a beautiful, talented and radiant human being, pivotal in guiding my life and happiness through some of my most harrowing moments. It had been far too long since we had crossed paths, so we engineered a rendezvous halfway between me and her home in Flagstaff, in historic Jerome, Arizona. We met at Nellie Bly, known as the biggest kaleidoscope shop in the world. Nellie Bly is an enchanting, otherworldly, miraculous and wonderful place brimming with crystals, shells, colors and fractals everywhere. They even have huge flowerpots that they have turned into kaleidoscopes that three people can watch at a time. They also offer to take your picture through one of the kaleidoscopes. If you are homesick for the stars, this is a place you must experience.

Sick-A-Licious Sam

During this time, I was taking 3-4 hot showers a day, slurping down hot tea and pumping myself full of powerful drugs trying to keep going. I missed some work, and many a social engagement, and did lots of good self-care, and seemed to be limping along, even if not very well. Then I got back to Tucson, and the studio apartment. Remember the studio? That I rented for 2 months straight, and seem hardly to have been in? And where all the construction work was going to be completely finished next door when I return from Prescott “I swear to God you won’t have any more problems?” Yeah, that studio. So I got back in the late evening, and before even unpacking, I dashed straight in to take a hot shower to clean out my sinuses and lungs, which were desiccated and clogged from the drive. Unfortunately, instead of the hot steamy water I was desperately craving, I was instead awash with crushing disappointment from cold water, plugged sinuses and a continued painful hacking cough. I went over next door to check the water heater, and it appeared someone had deliberately turned it off. I tried to turn it on, but it was gas heat, and the auto-starter wasn’t working because they had allowed the pilot to go out as well. I didn’t have any matches, or the courage to try lighting a pilot even if I had. So I went back into my bathroom and sobbed. It now being 2 am in the morning, I was not at my most rational. Also note that I had continued to way overuse my inhaler to try to keep breathing, which makes my heart race like it’s in the Indy 500, and markedly worsens symptoms of fear, worry and anxiety. So I did what any thoroughly irrational person would do. I called my friend in Japan, because it was only 6pm there, and cried and whined about how much my life sucked, and she listened. I was near full panic-mode, thinking I was progressing to pneumonia from whatever crud I already had. I had terrified myself into a tizzy by the time I got her on the phone, and I latched onto her like a drowning shipwrecked sailor flailing around the water who finds a floating piece of sea trash. Bless her heart, she talked me down from ”frenetic hysteria” to “moderately dismayed;” a huge improvement. She further convinced me that I was not in imminent danger of death, and talked me into going to the clinic tomorrow to get checked out by a health professional. Besides myself. Did I mention I don’t have health insurance? Yeah, I’m kind of “high risk” right now, with moving all over the place, minimal stability, sick as hell and not thinking straight. Not one of my easiest travel moments.

Clinic, Ho!

So the next day I dragged my sorry butt to see one of my friends/colleagues at the clinic, and she executed a detailed dissection of my 2+ weeks of symptomatology and general wretchedness. She concluded that either it wasn’t pneumonia, or it was, but it was already being treated by the antibiotics and steroids I had put myself on several days earlier. Either way it was good news, and my mental status improved immediately and dramatically. Other than that, it’s been a pretty boring, uneventful and easy couple of months.